I started out as a Mac user in about 1985 in a world which will be totally unfamiliar to almost all readers of OSNews. You wrote out your stuff by longhand, and a secretary typed it on a word processor. If you were lucky and able to manage it, you could dictate it. But you did not dictate into a dictating machine, because these were big heavy and expensive. You dictated it directly to someone who could 'take shorthand'. If you had a PC, it ran DOS. You looked for your files, and moved them around, started applications, one at a time, from the command line, and the command line was not pretty, it was green on black.

Off-topic, but I just use an emulator and one of these great retro-joysticks : http://www.vesalia.de/e_competitionusb.htm
There's simply no substitute for being able to use a real joystick for your retro gaming pleasure :-)